Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is like al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden because they both have terrorist friends, a GOP leader says.

Virginia state GOP party chairman Jeffrey Frederick, a legislator from Prince William, Va., says Obama and bin Laden both have friends that bombed the Pentagon, referring to Obama's acquaintance with 1960s radical William Ayers, Time Magazine reported Monday.

Frederick issued the comments while providing talking points to GOP volunteers in western Prince William County as they prepared for a door-to-door canvass, the magazine said.

The comments brought condemnation from Virginia Democrats as well as some Republicans, The Washington Post reported. McCain spokeswoman Gail Gitcho denounced Frederick's remarks, calling them not appropriate. While Barack Obama is associated with domestic terrorist William Ayers, the McCain campaign disagrees with the comparison that Jeff Frederick made, she told the Post.

Ayers, now a University of Illinois at Chicago professor, has admitted involvement with some bombings in the early 1970s as a co-founder of the Weather Underground. Authorities, however, say he was not involved in a 1972 bombing of a Pentagon rest room in which no one was hurt but classified files were damaged, the Post said.

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